AuthorTopic: MALTA organs (Read 5484 times)

If you are visiting Malta and would like to visit and play a couple of historic Italian instruments, get in touch with we and we'll try to arrange that for you. Robert Buhagiar (organbuilder and restorer)email: buhagiar.robert@gmail.comwebsite: www.robertbuhagiar.com

Second - welcome Robert! It's great to see you here on the organ matters board and I hope you'll tell us a bit about your maintainance challenges and restorations from time to time that you encounter in Malta.

For anyone who has not been, Malta's a great place to be but you don't want to drive anywhere between 4.30 and 6.30-7pm as the traffic is beyond imagination . . . although the organs are well worth visiting.

At Cospicua Robert kindly showed me and demonstrated an ancient instrument that he had restored and rebuilt which had been long forgotten. Although pitched at 4ft it was remarkably effective. I'll try to get footage of the visit onto YouTube before long.

In my opinion, however, St Pauls is not for me the venue really to appreciate organ music. It merely ends up being a blur of tonal colour without really being able to discern the music. Perhaps it's a matter of instrument placement. The ideal is a very long building, without transepts nor dome and in this, in England the chapel of Charterhouse School, and the basilicas both of Albi and St Maximin in France really stand out.

I love big reverb, but it does come with a price indeed. Back in the 70s, I went to a recital at L'Oratoire de St.-Joseph in Montreal, home of a 5-manual, 78-stop Von Beckerath. This is an Art-Deco version of St. Peter's Basilica, smaller, of course, but with about 9 seconds reverb. One Bach piece, in G-major, had a fast tempo. The G.O. 16' Trombone and 8' Trompette in the left hand, an 8' flute and sesquialtera in the right, you could make out the melody in the right, but the reeds were all smeared.

I think one reason for this, is that in the dome, soundwaves keep going all over the place and intersect themselves.

It's great that L'pool Cath.'s organ is in such capable hands. Hands so capable that the care of an organ in southern Europe may have been placed in those same hands. If so, then I'm happy for Mr. Wells.